Papers › Sparsity in long-time control of neural ODEs
Sparsity in long-time control of neural ODEs
Carlos Esteve-Yagüe, Borjan Geshkovski
We consider the neural ODE and optimal control perspective of supervised learning, with ℓ¹-control penalties, where rather than only minimizing a final cost (the \emph{empirical risk}) for the state, we integrate this cost over the entire time horizon. We prove that any optimal control (for this cost) vanishes beyond some positive stopping time. When seen in the discrete-time context, this result entails an \emph{ordered} sparsity pattern for the parameters of the associated residual neural network: ordered in the sense that these parameters are all $0$ beyond a certain layer. Furthermore, we provide a polynomial stability estimate for the empirical risk with respect to the time horizon. This can be seen as a \emph{turnpike property}, for nonsmooth dynamics and functionals with ℓ¹-penalties, and without any smallness assumptions on the data, both of which are new in the literature.
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